Former CIA Officer Mike Baker on Ukraine and Putin

The Putin thing scares the shit out of me though because he's a... You know, when it comes to warlords, he's a legitimate warlord. Yeah. Who is in charge of... I didn't know that they had more nukes than us. I mean I guess it's kind of a moot point, right? Because... How many do you need? Yeah, how many do you need? Everybody's got enough to kill everybody. How many times over? Yeah. Isn't it something crazy like 10 times over? Yeah, they did the math and it was in double digits. It's not good. It's not good, but it's... Look, if you step back, everybody's thinking, okay, how did this fucked up situation happen? Well, it's been building obviously, right? I mean, how much news coverage do we have of, well, they're adding more troops to the border with Ukraine. Wonder what they're doing. It could have been military exercises. So there was a tremendous amount of speculation leading up to what the fuck is going on, which in a sense points to how lacking the intelligence is on Putin, on plans and intentions, right? And that's a heavy lift, right? To come up with that sort of intel, because ideally you're going to want a human source. You know, you can get... You can gather intelligence from a variety of sources, but you really want human access. People who can tell you, you know what? I had a meeting with him and boy, I tell you what, he was pissed off or this is what he said or this is how he looked. Without that, without knowing what plans and intentions are or being able to gather intel on say the command staff, everybody was kind of speculating. Willy won'ty. What's he going to do? Well, stepping back, if you look at what he's done, he's been pretty damn consistent, right? Over the years. And so I guess, you know, in a part, a lot of it was optimistic thinking, okay, he just wants the eastern part of the country. He's just going to go in there and take that because, you know, maybe he's already got it. He's declared those two republics legit. Maybe that's all he wants. He's already taken Crimea. And so I think that was optimistic thinking, hoping that, you know, the guy is not going to lose his shit and go all the way through the country. Well, that's what he's done. And in part, because again, if you look at what he did in Chechnya, if you look at what he did helping Assad in Syria, if you look at what he did annexing Crimea, if you look at Georgia, Abkhazia, South of Sheshia, every step of the way, he's been following in his mind this stated desire that he's made very public over the years to rebuild his sphere of influence. Right. So in part, you could argue we kind of miss the obvious, right? We didn't see the obvious in front of us because we were all kind of hoping and mirroring our values on to Putin, who doesn't deserve to have our values mirrored on to him because we're thinking maybe he just wants a little bit. Maybe he just trying to make a point. Maybe he just wants them to sign a charter saying they won't be part of NATO. So anyway, you know, my point being twofold, I guess. We missed the boat on that. We missed it in part because we're always trying to be optimistic and trying to think, okay, well, maybe they think like we do. Maybe there's a rational process there. And then part of it is intel was lacking. And when it comes to intel, when you're talking about like in-person intel, how difficult is that to get on a guy like Putin? It's really tough. I mean, you know, look, it's a very heavy lift. The higher they go up the food chain, because the smaller your pool of potential access points are. Right. So, you know, you've got some mid-level person floating around, you know, a government office somewhere in some target country. And, you know, maybe you've got lots of options. Okay. Who do they socialize with? Right. Who can I get access to? Who might, you know, be next to them? You know, do they have a driver? Can I recruit the driver? Things like that. Right. Sometimes it's very simple. But Putin's had an increasingly small circle of close advisors and of people that he counts on and trusts. And part of that may be, you know, the fact that that was accelerated through the two-year pandemic where he decidedly was shutting himself off because he was, you know, paranoid like a lot of people were about COVID. Do you remember when there was a guy who suicide drove into Putin's car and Putin wasn't in it? Yeah. When was that? That was a few years back. Yeah. Some guy, there was oncoming traffic and he timed it right when there must have been someone communicating with him, letting him know where Putin's car is. But Putin wasn't even in it. Yeah. And turned right into oncoming traffic and used his car as a weapon and killed the both of them. Yeah. I think killed the both of them. Yeah. We'll get you to look up when that was. You've seen the video though, right? Yeah. It was a while back though. It was- Four or five years maybe? Yeah. But he's, you know, people have been talking about is he losing his shit? Is he, you know, is he going crazy? I don't think it's any of that, right? He's- He gets on a table when he negotiates and talks to people. He's like 40 feet away from him. Yeah. Yeah. And so he, but he, and that assessment was clear during the course of the pandemic. He was he was isolating himself. He was being, you know, very, very cautious. But I mean, and so maybe that had something to do with it. But he, anyway, point being is it's tough to, when you've got a small potential well of targets you can go after when you're talking about recruiting somebody who's got access to a high priority target, that's, you know, that's probably one of the heaviest lifts we've got. How do you get, like, how does someone get access to like a driver? Do you use a girl? Is that the best way to do it? No, not really. I mean, you know what, it's, because what you're looking to do, this is not to fall into like, you know, spy talk and recruitment 101, but the movies and beach books and everything will have you believe that, you know, the best way to hook somebody to recruit somebody is, you know, blackmail or, or a honey trap or something, you know, there's usually you're working on on something else. You're not necessarily working on the ideology, but you don't want to start from a negative basis, right? Because in even in normal terms, in the best of circumstances, when somebody's recruited to spy on their country to spy on on their organization, whatever it may be, there's a clock starts ticking, you know, and it because things start to decay, right? The person starts to decay. It's very wearing on a human, right? And for a variety of reasons. And so you know, that window is going to close at some point, it may not end well. So you're trying to optimize that. And if you start from a negative perspective, if you've got someone cooperating with you because they're blackmailing, they're under the gun here, and they hate you, and they hate, you know, what they're doing. That's not what you're looking for. You're looking for a more, and it sounds weird, but you're looking for more positive approach. So how do you do that? Like, how would you get a driver to be your buddy? Well, it's a, there's a recruitment process, a cycle that you go through, but everyone's taking notes. But you, first of all, you got to know what information you're looking for, right? And so that task can get set, you know, outside the building. If you're talking about the agency or really any head Intel service, theoretically, the administration of power is setting priority tasking. So they send over this and they say, Hey, we need this. It's a priority target for us, this information. So you look around and you go, okay, well, who's got access to the information? All right, you build up that world, then you figure out who might be accessible, right? Because maybe you, you're interested in, you know, a target here, but he never leaves that country, you know, it's a denied area. And so then you find out who's got access to information, who might be accessible? Why might they be minded to talk to you? Can you create a scenario where you can get next to them? And then you're looking for points of leverage, right? You're really looking, and that doesn't necessarily mean you're looking to find a negative, right? You're looking for something that drives them. What makes, are their kids the most important thing to them, right? Do they have a kid who, you know, needs medical attention? Do they have a kid who they desperately want to send away to college, but they don't have the money, you know? So you're looking for something like that that may, again, it sounds strange, but you're talking about recruiting somebody for an espionage, but it's a positive rather than a negative. And that creates then a longer shelf life in a sense for that asset, if that makes sense. It does make sense, but I would imagine that when you're dealing with someone like, say, Kim Jong Un or Putin or, you know, some dictator, like they, they have to be prepared for things like this, right? So they probably are very cautious on who gets into their inner circle. Yeah. And that's, and that's a counterintelligence issue, right? So every, you know, every government out there, you know, they're worried about that, that very thing, right? And so, I mean, look, and Putin, he was a KGB officer for 15 years, right? Yeah. Now, interestingly, going back to Putin, he, he served in East Germany, I think for about half a dozen years, never really had an exposure to the West. So that's also something when you're, when you're talking about trying to assess his mindset, understand where he's coming from. Part of it is, look, if he, if he had been exposed to the West in a much bigger way, maybe he served in New York, you know, or he served wherever, you know, London, some place where he had more exposure. But you look at that guy and you go, he doesn't really understand how we think, right? And so that's an important thing. You got to tick that box and put that in there when you're doing an assessment of his personality and trying to, because that's part of understanding why he's doing what he's doing. You don't think he understands how we think? In what way? Well, fundamentally, I mean, if you look, if you live in an environment, right? If you, you know, if you go to China, you live in wherever, you know, Shenzhen or Shanghai or Beijing, and you're there for a few years, you're going to understand the culture, the mindset, much better than, you know, somebody who's never lived there and is, you know, just, you know, sitting in Washington in a think tank talking about what the Chinese regime may do next. So it's that immersion, it's that exposure, it's dealing with those people. It's the contact that you have. Look, I'm, you know, I'm old enough that I remember we, when the, when the wall started to fall when the Soviet Union was collapsing. From our perspective, right, as a government, as an intel service, right, we saw that as an opportunity, there's chaos there, right? And what did you have? You had intel officers like Putin, right? KGB, GRU officers who saw their world collapsing around them, because at the time before the Soviet Union collapsed, they were living the good life, right? They were the elite in a sense, right? They were pampered, their kids were going to get the best education. They were set for life, their kids were set for life. All of a sudden the Soviet Union starts going to shit, right? And you could see it. And, you know, so what did we do? Well, we were out there busy, right, working over whatever targets we might have access to, trying to see if maybe they think, you know, maybe there's another option here. Maybe there's an alternative. Maybe I can, you know, save myself and my family, you know, perhaps put aside some money by working for the other side. And that's a natural thing to do, right? Every service is going to do that if there's chaos on the other side. So I remember you could see the confusion and the humiliation, right, and the fear in some of these guys as this was happening. And so Putin went through that same process. Again, it's one of those things that you do. You put all that together to try to create this profile of this individual, right? Because I'm not buying the talk when, you know, people get on TV and go, oh, he's going crazy. He's losing his mind. He's, I'm not buying that. There's a reason why he's driving the way he is. And again, he's being somewhat consistent. He's never given a shit about civilian casualties, right? Never bothered him before. I mean, that situation in Chechnya when they went in there, right? And I mean, that was, yeah, I have to argue, the other side was different as well. Some of the Chechen separatists were in some of the shit that they were pulling. But at the same time, he didn't care whether it was count civilians or separatists and members of their militia and military. So I don't know. I think it's one of those things where I think with Putin, we've got to be really pragmatic here. We got to understand. I don't think he's, he's not crazy. He's not going to say, okay, I'm in a corner. I'm going to, I'm going to push the button and fire off a couple of tactical nukes. Right. I think what he's gotten to the point is, is, you know, you guys have disrespected me. This is how he thinks, right? You've disrespected me. Fuck you all. I told you I want my sphere of sphere of influence and I don't care where that to break it. I'm going to have it. When you say sphere of influence, do you mean he wants to reclaim what is the former Soviet Union? Yeah. He said that. He said publicly in the past, he called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. And he's serious about that. He means that. So he's not, he's not fucking around. And again, if we look at it, he's being consistent, right? He's being consistent over the years. He's a dictator. He's a despot. He's looking increasingly more like, you know, he's isolating himself, which, you know, that's, that's a danger in a sense to all those people around him, right? He's already cut loose some of his inner circle just over the past couple of weeks, right? Causing? Yeah. He's gotten rid of his, we put under house arrest a couple of his FSB senior command. Why did he do that? The domestic service because he, because the intel was so bad because go again. Oh, because of Ukraine? Yeah, because of Ukraine. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, because of Ukraine. So they went in and the assumption was, and now again, this is where our intel is lacking. Was he given bad intel or was he given intel and he just chose to ignore it? But it appears as if what he believed and what the top military commanders, some of whom have also been let go or possibly reassigned, I don't think that's a good thing in Russia, is that they were going to get in there maybe within 48 hours, they were going to have control of Kyiv, they would be welcomed by the population in the Ukraine and they would be able to establish a puppet regime, a new government. I mean, they moved the previous president that was a Russian backed, they moved him from Russia to Minsk in preparation, it appeared, to move him down to take over the government, which is in a sense, batshit crazy because he was kicked out during the last revolution by the people. That was 2014? Yeah, that was that orange revolution that they had.